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A new report by a liberal-leaning think tank recommends a dramatic overhaul of military pay, retirement and health care benefits as part of a $1 trillion cut in defense spending over 10 years.

The Center for American Progress calls for capping pay raises, eliminating military health benefits for many retirees who are covered by an employer-provided plan, and reducing the value of military retired pay as well as making retirees wait until age 60 to start receiving it.

Recommendations are included in a report, Rebalancing Our National Security, released Oct. 31 by the progressive think tank and advocacy group. The report opposes across-the-board cuts in defense spending that could occur beginning in January under sequestration but still calls for major reductions in defense spending.

Capping pay raises, the report says, could save $16.5 billion over the next five years. Reducing retiree health care benefits, through a combination of restricting care and raising fees, could save $15 billion a year. Reforming military retired pay could save, in the short term, up to $13 billion a year, and over time could save up to $70 billion a year off the current plan.

In addition to cutting compensation and benefits, the report also recommends cutting the number of active-duty troops permanently based in Europe and Asia, saving $10 billion a year. It recommends withdrawing 33,000 troops from Europe and about 17,000 from Asia.

In calling for less spending on military pay raises, the report basically endorses a plan proposed, but not yet executed, by the Defense Department. Under the Pentagon plan, pay raises beginning in 2015 would be capped at less than the average increase in private sector pay, a move that responds to a belief that military members are being paid more than civilians with comparable jobs and experience. This happened because Congress, over Pentagon objections, has regularly provided the military with raises that were slightly larger than the average private-sector raise to eliminate what had been perceived as a pay gap. The end result, says the report, is that the average service member is receiving $5,400 more in annual compensation than a comparable civilian.

The Defense Department plan calls for a 0.5 percent raise in 2015, a 1 percent raise in 2016 and a 1.5 percent raise in 2017 to bring pay levels back in line, which the CAP report endorses.
“To its credit, the Department of Defense has attempted to tackle this problem in its FY 2013 budget request, outlining a plan that would gradually bring military pay back in line with the Employment Cost Index without cutting any service member’s pay,” the report says. “Congress should demonstrate political courage and allow the Department of Defense to execute this long-term plan.”

Similarly, the report endorses many of the Defense Department’s proposals for cutting health care costs by raising fees, mostly on retirees and their families. But the report goes a step further: “To truly restore the Tricare program to stable financial footing, the Defense Department should enact measures to reduce the overutilization of medical services and limit double coverage of working-age military retirees,” the report says.

One idea would be to modify Tricare for Life benefits for Medicare-eligible retirees so that the program would not cover the first $500 of costs per year and would cover only 50 percent of the next $5,000.

Another idea would be to mandate that working-age retirees could only have Tricare benefits if they or their spouses do not have access to employer-provided health benefits. The report suggests this would be an income-based restriction but does not say what the cutoff should be.
The report also recommends modifying military retirement benefits. For anyone currently in the military with fewer than 10 years of service, benefits could be cut: Instead of receiving 50 percent of basic pay after 20 years of service, with immediate benefits, the report says the benefits would be 40 percent of base pay with payments not beginning until age 60. For people not yet in the military, there would be no fixed retired pay in the future, only a pre-tax retirement savings plan based on contributions from the service member.

If they want to save some money, slash officer pay. Seriously, I've got 2nd and 1st Lt's here who do the jobs that E-3's can do, yet their making just as much, or more then I am. People who have been in the AF for 2 years, make as much money as I who have been in for 11, and they have significantly less responsibility then I do.

Drives me nuts.

Thats my Enlisted bitch about Officers of the week.

In most sports, cold-cocking an opposing player repeatedly in the face with a series of gigantic Slovakian uppercuts would get you a multi-game suspension without pay.

In hockey, it means you have to sit in the penalty box for five minutes.

If they want to save some money, slash officer pay. Seriously, I've got 2nd and 1st Lt's here who do the jobs that E-3's can do, yet their making just as much, or more then I am. People who have been in the AF for 2 years, make as much money as I who have been in for 11, and they have significantly less responsibility then I do.

Drives me nuts.

Thats my Enlisted bitch about Officers of the week.

It happens everywhere, including business. I had 23 years in with my company, had a much more technical sale necessitating knowing federal contracting, as well as the different procurement rules dictated by local governments, plus selling the entire product line vs a more limited one, and they'd end up compensating the flavor of the month hire with no experience other than advanced butt kissing more than me. It was extremely demotivating. I think their business in my area of expertise pretty much fell apart after I left.

Stuff just isn't fair sometimes. At least with a bit of distance from it, the negative feelings have subsided a bit. Now I understand how my dad felt when he had worked for one of the Baby Bell's for almost 45 years and would have to train the woman or recent college grad from one of the elite schools (my dad called them jet jobs who shot to the top) who would become his boss. Stuff just isn't fair all the time.

‎" To the world you are just one more person, but to a rescued pet, you are the world."

In one of my earlier lives I watched as a wage/hr man compared first of the month paychecks with the district mgr who had told him that the pay scale was loaded in the hourly wage favor.

The 'grunt' said 'No, you did make more than me.'

The mgr responded 'But I don't have another check coming on the 15th like you do.'

It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

Calling the Center for American Progress a think tank does disservice to the word "think". They're simply a means to translate leftist ideology into policy goals by pretending to present their positions as the results of studies. From discoverthenetworks.org (http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/g...asp?grpid=6709):

Think tank headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta

Helped launch Media Matters For America in 2004

The Center for American Progress (CAP) describes itself as “an independent nonpartisan educational institute dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through progressive ideas and action” in such areas as “energy, national security, economic growth and opportunity, immigration, education, and health care.”

The prime mover behind CAP's creation was the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. Deeply disappointed by George W. Bush's presidential election victory in 2000, and by the subsequent election of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress two years later, Soros was convinced that the Republicans' success was a result of their superior think-tank infrastructure and media presence. Thus he called for the creation of a new left-wing, pro-Democrat think tank that, with proper funding, could establish a high-profile media presence of its own—and thereby counter the conservative message machine more directly than did existing liberal-left thinks such as the Brookings Institution, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the Urban Institute, and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Investigative journalist Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the March 1, 2004 edition of The Nation: "The idea for the Center [CAP] began with discussions in 2002 between[Morton] Halperin and George Soros, the billionaire investor.… Halperin, who heads the office of Soros' Open Society Institute, brought [former Clinton chief of staff John]Podesta into the discussion, and beginning in late 2002 Halperin and Podesta circulated a series of papers to funders." The Capital Research Center reports that Podesta eagerly “took on the project of creating a new laboratory for liberalism.”

Soon thereafter, Soros and Halperin (who would become CAP's senior vice president) recruited Harold Ickes—chief fundraiser and former deputy chief of staff for the Clinton White House—to help organize the new think tank, which was launched on July 7, 2003 as the American Majority Institute. The name was changed to Center for American Progress on September 1, 2003.

Hillary Clinton, too, was intimately involved in the formation of CAP. She told reporter Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine on October 12, 2003, "We need some new intellectual capital. There has to be some thought given as to how we build the 21st-century policies that reflect the Democrat Party's values." She later told The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss: "We've had the challenge of filling a void on our side of the ledger for a long time, while the other side created an infrastructure that has come to dominate political discourse. The Center [CAP] is a welcome effort to fill that void."

Persistent press leaks during CAP's early years confirmed that Mrs. Clinton, and not its nominal leader, John Podesta, was ultimately in charge of the organization at that time. "It's the official Hillary Clinton think tank," an inside source confided to Christian Bourge of United Press International. Robert Dreyfuss noted in The Nation: "In looking at Podesta's center, there's no escaping the imprint of the Clintons. It's not completely wrong to see it as a shadow government, a kind of Clinton White-House-in-exile—or a White House staff in readiness for President Hillary Clinton." Dreyfuss noted the abundance of Clintonites on the Center's staff, among them Robert Boorstin, Bill Clinton's national security speechwriter; Gene Sperling, Democratic Leadership Council staffer and the former head of President Clinton's National Economic Council; Matt Miller, former senior advisor to President Clinton's Office of Management and Budget; Debbie Berger, daughter of Clinton national security chiefSandy Berger; and others. In 2007 Mrs. Clinton said, at the YearlyKos convention of left-wing bloggers, that she herself had "helped to start and support" CAP.

From its inception, one of CAP's chief priorities has been to carry out "rapid response" to what it calls conservative "attacks" in the media. To this end, CAP has always maintained numerous spokespeople and “experts” ready to appear, on short notice, on national talk shows to debate or respond to conservative commentators.

In a related endeavor, on May 3, 2004, CAP helped launch David Brock's Media Matters for America to serve as a "watchdog" organization monitoring "rightwing" media for ethics violations and factual inaccuracies. According to The New York Times, Brock conferred with Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle (a Distinguished Senior Fellow with CAP), and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore about Media Matters before embarking on the project. Podesta, noted the Times, "introduced [Brock] to potential donors."

CAP's Close Ties to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama

The Capital Research Center describes CAP, quite accurately, as “an adjunct of the Democratic Party” that “manufactures talking points, spins the daily news, and does opposition research”—essentially “a nonprofit public relations firm.” Little, if anything, that CAP produces can be considered serious research. Its policy positions and recommendations are indistinguishable from those of the Democratic Party. This is because so many of the Center's senior staffers and Fellows are veterans of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, and of the Democratic National Committee.

>Snip<

From the moment Barack Obama was elected President in 2008, CAP had more influence on the new administration than did any other organization. As a November 2008 piece in Time magazine put it: "[N]ot since the Heritage Foundation helped guide Ronald Reagan's transition in 1981 has a single outside group held so much sway. Just as candidate Obama depended on CAP during the campaign for opposition research and talking points, President-elect Obama has effectively contracted out the management of his own government's formation to [John] Podesta.” Indeed, Podesta and at least ten additional CAP experts were among the president-elect's top advisors.

From the earliest days of the the Obama presidency, CAP helped formulate the administration's policies and supplied the White House with a steady stream of talking points designed to make those policies attractive to the public. Indeed, as of December 2008, before then-president-elect Obama had even taken his oath of office, he had already pledged his intent to fulfill some of CAP's chief policy recommendations. These included the Center's call for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq coupled with a buildup of forces in Afghanistan; a plan to implement universal healthcare coverage for all Americans; and a plan to create “green jobs” that would combat “global warming.”According to a November 18, 2008 report by Bloomberg.com, CAP “has become ... an intellectual wellspring for Democratic policy proposals, including many that are shaping the agenda of the ... Obama administration.”

>Snip<

The CAP Message Machine

As of February 2011, CAP's single largest department was its communications department, comprised of 31 full-time staffers tasked with spinning the news in a direction favorable to the Obama administration and the Democrats. “Rare is the day a reporter doesn’t get three or more press releases from [CAP],” said the Capital Research Center, adding:

“[CAP] hosts almost daily conference calls to reporters promoting its policy positions and responses to news events. The staff accommodates the press, eagerly arranging one-on-one interviews and supplying quot- able quotes for news stories. For reporters with deadlines crashing down on them, the Center is well-known as an easy quote machine. Podesta regularly appears on Sunday morning news programs.... Center researchers provide useful talking points for Democratic members of Congress.... To further spin the news, every weekday the Action Fund emails reporters a 'progress report,' a 400-500 word hyperlink-heavy analysis of the issue of the moment. The links often refer back to the Center’s own various blogs and website postings. It is a reliable echo chamber for left-wing conventional wisdom.”